I love machine quilting, and I especially love the look of bright machine quilting that stands out from the background. Sadly, I'm not very good at this particular skill. Time after time I quilt with bright colors on a dark background in order to make my quilting visible. Alas, this accentuates every mistake, every jerked stop and start, every little knot, and every imperfection. Most often I look at my quilting and think Blech! However, for this quilt, I started the quilting on the brightly colored hexagon part using a lightweight thread which more or less matched the top. I free-motion quilted large leafy vines parallel to the long rows of hexagons. Since the top is so busy and the thread matched, you can hardly see them. However, by the time I got to the black part, I was quite practiced at the pattern and felt brave enough to use bright contrasting threads. In the end I think it turned out pretty nice, and the bright contrasting quilting in the black area is my very favorite part of the whole quilt. I always imagine that these are part leafy vine, part centipede.
Technically the quilting is still not very good- I got marked unsatistfactory on stitch length, tension, and smoothness by the quilt judges at the MQS show, but I'm trying to practice practice practice!
Here's the whole quilt, it's called "One Hen, Two Ducks". I added the skinny partial borders for a balancing bit of asymmetrical color, and bound it in-you guessed it-brights! It's pretty big (100x73) and will go well with my window on the ocean quilt on my matching twin beds whenever I have a guest room.
